"You remember, Tula, the woman led by the padre at Soledad?"
"It may be that woman is captive to the same men who took your people," he said slowly watching her, "and it may be we can save her."
"May it also be that we can catch the man?" she asked, and her eyes half closed, peered up at him in curious intensity. "Can that be, O friend?"
"One day it must be,--one day, and prayers are making all the times for that day," she insisted stolidly. "The old women are talking, and for that day they want him."
Kit Rhodes felt a curious creepy sensation of being near an unseen danger, some sleeping serpent basking in the sun, harmless until aroused for attack. He thought of the gentle domestic Valencia, and now this child, both centered on one thought--to sacrifice a traitor on the day of Judas!
"Little girls should make helpful prayers," he ventured rather lamely, "not vengeance prayers."
"I was the one to make cry of a woman, when my father went under the earth," she said. It was her only expression of the fact that she had borne a woman's share of all their joint toil in the desert,--and he caught her by the shoulder, as she turned away.
"Why, Kid Cleopatra, it isn't a woman's work you've done at all. It's a man's job you've held down and held level," he declared heartily. "That's why I am counting on you now. I need eyes to watch when I have to be in other places."
"I watch," she agreed, "I watch for you, but maybe I make my own prayers also;--all the time prayers."
"Make one for a straight trail to the border, and all sentries asleep!" he suggested. "We have a pile of yellow rock to get across, to say nothing of our latest puzzling prospect."
As the day wore on the latest "prospect" presented many complications to the imagination, and he tramped the corridors of Mesa Blanca wondering why he had seen but one side of the question the night before, for in the broad light of day there seemed a dozen, and all leading to trouble! That emerald-eyed daughter of a renegade priest had proven a host in herself when it came to breeding trouble. She certainly had been unlucky.
"Well, it might be worse," he confided to Bunting out in the corral. "Cap Pike might have tagged along to discourse on the general tomfoolery of a partner who picks up a damsel in distress at every fork of the trail. Not that he'd be far wrong at that, Baby. If any hombre wanted to catch me in a bear trap he'd only need to bait it with a skirt."